Sunday, July 29, 2012

9 Lessons Learned from Using Reddit

Starting a new blog focused on politics, I decided to try reddit as a source to kickstart some traffic. As reddit referrals are now 50% of my traffic, I think that the experiment has had a successful start, so let me share some of my lessons learned.

Self-promoting blog content on reddit is easy and without significant friction.

The reddit post title attracts the interest as that is what the users primarily will see, so experiment and test.

Reddit’s system for voting and comments are used actively and provide insightful metrics when feedback is not being left on a new blog.

Older evergreen blog posts that are not attracting traffic can be resurrected with a reddit post.

Subreddits are great for doing segmentation testing as you can target specific communities and tailor titles to that community.

Posting the same post to different subreddits on different days can keep posts active overtime and allow for easy differentiation of traffic from different subreddits for results tracking.

Subreddits have their own personalities and can sometimes respond differently than their name would suggest.

Controversy resulting from matching a post with a subreddit can help traffic to your site even if it is not helping your link karma. Highly recommended.

Reddit offers a good opportunity to reach new potential readers from outside your usual circles of communication.

If you have not been using Reddit to promote your own blog content, using the above lessons learned, I have a suggestion for how to start with a test using the traffic stats already tracked for your blog.

Start by picking seven of your posts that you think deserve more eyes. In doing so, do not ignore older posts that still have timely information.

Brainstorm types of people that you think would be interested in each specific post.

Use the search feature on reddit to find subreddits that are a community for those types of people.

Throughout the week, submit links for your posts to various subreddits and track the results using your own blog’s traffic stats.

At the end of the week, review your own lessons learned and plan how you could use reddit to promote your blog content.

You can check out reddit’s FAQ for how-to details.
If you try this experiment, please share your own lessons learned.